


make them wish they'd never seen me

by notthequiettype



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 10:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13634004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthequiettype/pseuds/notthequiettype
Summary: It's Halloween and Ryan is at a party he doesn't actually want to be at.





	make them wish they'd never seen me

It's Halloween and Ryan is at a party he doesn't actually want to be at.

He's not opposed to Halloween parties, even these kinds where the point is to drink your way into someone's Instagram or costume, but he doesn't really know anyone here and he'd only come because Christina wanted to and he didn't have a particularly good excuse not to.

Well, "I don't want to" seems good enough to him, and he always accepts it when she uses it, but he's not sure she'd agree.

So he puts on a half-assed costume and he goes. He's found that adulthood is mostly just sucking it up and going places he doesn't really want to. But there's decent food and only top shelf booze and even though he doesn't know anyone, he doesn't run out of people to talk to. People still know him sometimes; it isn't what it was like five years ago, but it's enough that he seems an easy mix of approachable and interesting.

He's talking to a guy -- Adam? he thinks -- who he's pretty sure he's met at least twice before. They're talking about a car accident they'd both driven past a couple of weeks ago on the 110 -- Ryan can't even remember where he was coming to or going from, he fucking hates the 110 -- and it's kind of an appropriate topic for Halloween, but also kind of grossly inappropriate for a party. 

Ryan's finishing his second glass of Johnnie Walker Blue because he kind of gets off on drinking other people's show-off liquor when he sees Brendon over Adam?'s shoulder.

They're technically in the same room, but really almost two rooms apart -- the whole open concept thing has always fucked with Ryan's sense of space, made it blurry and arbitrary -- but he's suddenly all Ryan can see.

He taps his glass against his mouth and tries to decide if he wants to turn tail and disappear or plant himself and run the risk of an interaction.

He knows people call it the divorce -- dickbag journalists always say it with this smirk that makes Ryan pissy and difficult, even he fucking thinks of it that way when he's feeling particularly maudlin -- but it hadn't had the sheen of clean and legal and mediated that divorce does. 

He and Jon had been frustrated and pissed on one side and Brendon and Spencer had been impatient and pissed on the other and Jon and Spencer had wanted everything to be gentle and amicable and Ryan and Brendon had wanted to rip each other's throats out.

They'd gotten pretty close before Jon had finally dragged Ryan out of the house and taken him to get ice cream and said, "Dude, you're going to kill each other. Why don't we just go do our thing and let them do their thing?"

Ryan had felt his shoulders drop, defeated, and thought, ' _Fuck_ , I can't believe Jon said it first.' It had been easy, then, to go back and say it out loud. 

Brendon's entire face turned blotchy and red and he'd walked out of the room without saying anything. Spencer had said, "Okay," nodding, and hugged them both like it didn't cost him anything to do it.

Ryan hasn't talked to Brendon since and the idea of doing it now, four fingers of scotch in while he's wearing a Halloween costume in a stranger's house sounds like a particular kind of hell, but he can't bring himself to move, just watching Brendon laugh at the kitchen island, an extra flash of white where he's got fangs.

One of the things Ryan had liked about Brendon when Brent brought him around the first time was how easily he laughed, not like he was pretending they were funny, but just like he was a person who laughed easily and meant it, going big and animated when he was particularly amused.

He was never embarrassed to let people see his feelings and it made Ryan jealous -- angry with it sometimes, almost furious -- because Ryan held in almost every feeling he had and turned them into songs, obsessively and desperately, but Brendon could just loose his feelings on the world without shame and have plenty left over to make something Ryan had slaved over better with ten words and seemingly zero effort.

Brendon had told him once, a little drunk and sprawled all over Ryan on the couch like he did, "You put all your feelings right here," and he'd touched the corner of Ryan's mouth with two fingers, looking up at him from his lap. Ryan had huffed softly, that corner raising against Brendon's fingertips.

"See?" Brendon had said, grinning brightly, his mouth wet and pink against his teeth.

Ryan hasn't looked away from Brendon since he spotted him, still half-heartedly talking to Adam?, and he catches the exact moment that a tall, catsuited woman leans in and points him out to Brendon.

He looks away before Brendon can catch his eye, chest going a little tight, and sucks an ice cube into his mouth. When he looks up again, Brendon's just a little behind Adam? and Ryan jerks his chin up at him and then toward the patio doors to Ryan's right. If he has to do this at all, he's doing it with as few witnesses as possible.

Brendon walks past him and out of the doors quietly and Ryan's annoyed and grateful. It takes him a minute to extract himself from his conversation, pulling out his pack of cigarettes and tapping it against his watch, grateful that people in LA are so consistently horrified by it.

He puts one in his mouth as he slides the patio door open and moves through it, pulls his zippo out of his jeans and lights it as he walks around the pool to where Brendon's stretched out on a chaise, sits down at the foot of the one next to him.

"Can't believe you haven't quit." It's weird to hear Brendon's voice, a funny lisp to it from the fangs, and after so long. It's changed, deeper maybe, richer. He changes the station if he ever hears it. Brendon's lit with a flickering pale blue-green from the water. 

"Can't believe you did."

Brendon shrugs and then makes give-me fingers at Ryan. Ryan leans in and passes him the lit cigarette, watches him take a long drag and exhale while Ryan lights another. "Bad for your voice," Brendon says.

"I've heard." Ryan smokes slowly, not offering anything up. He doesn't feel as angry as he expected to, but he's not feeling particularly generous either. He's glad it's cold tonight and they're alone except for two smokers huddled up close to the house.

"This doesn't seem like your scene."

"It's really not." Ryan leans over, stubs his cigarette out in the citronella candle on the table between their chairs. "Girlfriend wanted to come. Couldn't come up with a good reason not to."

Brendon nods. "Women."

Ryan makes a small noise in his throat that might be a laugh.

Brendon stubs out his cigarette and leans forward, feet touching, knees spread, elbows resting on them. "Small world though."

Ryan does laugh then, small and mean. "Fucking-a." He listens to the water lapping against the edge of the pool in the breeze and tucks his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket. Brendon used to be awful at silences and it's aggressively surreal to only hear their breathing and the pool and the pulse of the music and people inside for as long as it lasts.

"I'm sorry that the thing with you and Jon didn't work out."

Ryan doesn't think he could have predicted that, but he should have. Brendon's cruelty was always surgical and Ryan still recognizes it. "Some experiments are meant to be short-lived." He's not lying; they did the thing they wanted to do until they didn't want to do it anymore, exactly like they'd agreed.

"How is he?"

"Good. Busy being a husband and dad. Says it turns out that’s what he's actually good at."

"And you?" Ryan can almost hear the strain of it, how badly Brendon didn't want to ask, didn't want to give in to the curiosity. If Ryan were younger and angrier, he'd think of it as winning. 

"Kids aren't for me. And Christina's not really the marrying type."

Brendon laughs, easy as always. "Are you?"

Ryan shrugs, pulls out another cigarette, and lights it. "Didn't think you were either."

"Sometimes you just have to do the thing."

Ryan takes a drag and leans back on his hands, looking up as he lets out the smoke. You can only see the brightest stars in LA and he misses how easy it was to get to the kind of dark you need to see them all outside Vegas. "I guess I should go find her," he says, finally. "She likes to get trashed and yell at me while we get in the car." Ryan's being mean, even if it's true. He likes Christina. She's interesting, but uncomplicated, and she never looks at him like she wants him to shut up.

He stubs out his cigarette as he gets up, startled when Brendon stands up into his space. "It was good to see you," Brendon says and Ryan can tell he almost means it. All that feeling right there in the open like always.

Ryan pulls him into a hug because he's not in the mood to lie to Brendon's face. He could've gone the rest of his life without this moment, but it's not really fair to make Brendon live with that.

They clap each other on the back, that weirdly aggressive thing guys do that Ryan has never been very good at, and pull back.

Brendon's hand slides up Ryan's arm and shoulder, palm landing on his jaw, long fingers curled against his neck. He's looking at Ryan with a mix of expressions Ryan remembers well -- curiosity and mischief -- but it's like they're being translated through the mask of Brendon's unfamiliar adult face. 

He's grown all the way into his features, even his mouth only seems slightly too big for his face, and his lashes are long and dark against his cheeks when he blinks. He's more handsome than pretty now, still unusual looking enough to be worth looking at more than once.

There was a time when Ryan had looked at his face and heard his voice and thought, 'This is my fucking meal ticket.' There'd also been a time where Ryan had looked at Brendon's face and thought, 'This is going to fucking ruin me.' He'd been right both times, but how right depended on how miserable he was when he thought about it.

Brendon's thumb moves up, dragging against the corner of Ryan's mouth. Ryan feels it acutely through the haze of buzz, the pad of his thumb hot against Ryan's skin, the electricity of the touch, and a tiny, sharp surge of pain where he'd split his bottom lip yesterday. 

Brendon looks into his eyes for a long time and Ryan lets him, looks back. "You still keep it all right here," Brendon says, his thumb grazing, and his mouth curved in a small smile.

Ryan lets the side of his mouth pull up under the touch because it would be easy not to, easy to stay cold, blank. 

Sometimes, Ryan thinks, the hard thing is better.

**Author's Note:**

> My wife has been doing a thing where she prompts me every day with something fun to write and this was yesterday's. Apologies for ahistorical stuff; I don't know much about these dudes anymore, but they're probably intentional errors anyway. Title is from "Radio, Radio" by Elvis Costello.


End file.
